Five blocks from Percey’s town house.

Rhyme thanked them and told them to stay on call, then barked, “Get Dellray’s teams over there now! You too, Sachs. Whether he’s there or not, we’ll have a scene to search. I think we’re getting close. Can you feel it, everybody? We’re getting close!”

Percey Clay was telling Roland Bell about her first solo flight.

Which didn’t go quite as she planned.

She’d taken off from the small grass strip four miles outside of Richmond, feeling the familiar ka-thunk ka-thunk as the Cessna’s gear bounded over the rough spots just before she hit V1 speed. Then back on the yoke and the crisp little 150 took to the air. A humid spring afternoon, just like this one.

“Must’ve been exciting,” Bell offered, with a curiously dubious look.

“Got more so,” Percey said, then took a hit from the flask.

Twenty minutes later the engine quit over the Wilderness in eastern Virginia, a nightmare of brambles and loblolly pine. She set the staunch plane down on a dirt road, cleared the fuel line herself, and took off once again, returning home without incident.

There was no damage to the little Cessna—so the owner never found out about the joyride. In fact the only fallout from the incident was the whipping she got from her mother because the principal at the Lee School had reported Percey’d been in yet another fight and had punched Susan Beth Halworth in the nose and fled after fifth period.

“I had to get away,” Percey explained to Bell. “They were picking on me. I think they were calling me ‘troll.’ I got called that a lot.”

“Kids can be cruel,” Bell said. “I’d tan my boys’ hides, they ever did anything like—Wait, how old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Can you do that? I mean, don’t you need to be eighteen to fly?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh. Then . . . how’d it work that you were flyin’?”

“They never caught me,” Percey said. “That’s how it worked.”

“Oh.”

She and Roland Bell were sitting in her room in the safe house. He’d refilled her flask with Wild Turkey—a bread-and-butter present from a mob informant who’d lived here for five weeks—and they were sitting on a green couch, the squelch mercifully turned down on his walkie-talkie. Percey sat back, Bell forward—his posture due not to the uncomfortable furniture but to his extraordinary mindfulness. His eye would catch the motion of a fly zipping past the door, a breath of air pushing a curtain, and his hand would stray to one of the two large guns he carried.

At his prompting she continued the story of her flying career. She got her student pilot certificate at age sixteen, her private pilot certificate a year later, and at eighteen she had her commercial ticket.

To her parents’ horror, she fled the tobacco business circuit (Father didn’t work for a “company” but for a “grower,” though it was a $6 billion corporation to everyone else) and went for her engineering degree. (“Dropping out of UVA was the first sensible thing she’s done,” her mother pointed out to Percey’s father, the only time the girl could remember her mother taking her side. The woman had added, “It’ll be easier to find a husband at Virginia Tech.” Meaning the boys won’t have such high standards.)